What is Firmographic Data & How to Use it?

[@nidpaul]

Dude, you've done a great job explaining the concept! 👏👏

[@fifimimi6834]

Can u do a video on how to collect and report the data and on how to manage it?

[@user-el5cb8jt3j]

FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO COPY THE KEY TAKEAWAYS TO THEIR NOTES, COPY THESE DOWN! THANKS DATARADE FOR THE AWESOME VIDEO!!! :))
-GP III
Firmographic Data are any characteristics that can describe a company
In terms of Data Attributes company data can be broken down into MACRO and MICRO scales
- Macro-scale Data Attributes categorize companies by industry, size..etc
- Micro-scale Data Attributes is where you differentiate the companies that have already been categorized in the macro by more specific behaviors such as sales cycles completion time and revenues

There is a lot of data publicly available, however, for private companies in emerging markets or for really specific information about public companies, much needed data like this might not be available.
Because of this companies seek out data providers to source firmographic data for them
How do firmographic data providers collect data?
It results in 3 different data types:
1. Company Websites
2. Company registers
3. Tax Declarations
Once these are “scraped” the collectors get what is called “self reported data,” aka data provided willingly and freely by available companies
If the data that collectors seek is not available in “self reported data” they can resort to:
- Social media posts
- Job posts
- Reports
And after “scraping” these data sources come up with what is known as “derived data”
ESPECIALLY in the case of private companies in emerging markets, data is not really widely available.
Because of this, even the largest data providers will go to the smaller data providers that will have access to private databases, government databases or manual verification by phone
So…
- Data providers
- Private Databases
- Phone Calls
These get manually collected by these collectors and make up what is considered to be “Verified Data”
How is firmographic data used?
The uses can be broken down into 3 categories:
1. Your customers
Marketing (Segmenting your B2B audience)
Sales planning (Forecasting, Set targets)
2. Your Suppliers (Who you source from, Risk management)
3. Existing Databases
Enrich existing data sets
Match key
- You need to make sure that the firmographic data your acquiring has a match key that will fit with the data you are buying
- Align intent data with contact data and the company
How do we know we are getting quality data?
- Does the data come with a match key that works with our data
- Is the scale of the data sufficient
- How up to date is the data?